Michael Splinter was raised on the most powerful incantation in the tech industry, Moore's Law, which roughly holds that computing power per dollar doubles every two years. During his 20 years at Intel
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Currently photovoltaics cost $2 to $3 per watt to build, down from $22 in 1980. Splinter thinks he can help drive the cost of solar to under $1 a watt. At that price, even after adding a dollar or two per watt of installation costs, solar power would rival grid-delivered fossil fuel power. (Bear in mind that watts here are measured at midday peaks. Even in California an installation rated at 1 kilowatt will produce only 1,600 kwh a year.)

Ambitious enough to be on Intel's shortlist of future chief executives, Splinter leaped at the chance to run his own show at Applied in 2003. The growth in solar captured Splinter's attention early on. Slowdowns at computer chip makers, who buy nearly all of Applied's equipment, hit hard. The $9.2 billion (revenue) company has a price-to-earnings ratio below that of Kraft Foods
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The solar cell manufacturing industry for years made do with hand-me-down tools from the computer chip industry. But last year solar cell manufacturers bought more silicon wafers than chipmakers--and solar's demand for wafers is growing three times as fast as demand from the rest of the electronics industry. Applied will likely hit $400 million in contracts for solar manufacturing gear by year-end; Splinter wants $1 billion by 2009.

Applied intends to trim the industry's costs in four ways: boost solar factory throughput, improve the productivity of every tool, cut materials costs by using photovoltaic materials more sparingly and raise solar cell efficiencies. Splinter has already spent close to $1 billion to hire hundreds of people for his solar group, buy two small thin-film equipment makers and invest in a silicon wafer firm in California.

Charles Gay, who is leading Applied's solar business, obsesses about speed. Computer chips are made in batches; solar cells are produced continuously. Coating tools once used to put films on sheets of glass are being tweaked so they can also rapidly coat thousands of individual wafers. Thin-film solar makers want to work with the 64-square-foot sheets of glass used by Applied's LCD customers, but solar glass is four times as thick as display glass. So Applied is strengthening the arms of the robots it sells to hold glass sheets. "We'd like to move one ton of silicon wafers through a line in an hour," Gay says. At that speed one factory could produce a gigawatt of solar modules per year, ten times as much as the U.S. is now installing. "This is like the 1970s in the computer chip business," says Splinter, flashing a 200-watt smile.